I am a historian of Southern Africa and I specialize in gender history, women’s history, and institutional culture. Specifically, right now I am working on a book on higher education during the Apartheid period in South Africa. I also have an interest in and have and will teach a course in memory, autobiography, and memoir; I guess it’s what people used to call “self-writing”; people writing about themselves.

My Ph.D. is from the University of Zimbabwe. It’s more common that we have Africans coming to America to do their graduate education; I went the other way and did my graduate education after teaching high school in Zimbabwe. I lived in Zimbabwe for 8 years and then moved to South Africa for 17 years, so I spent the better part of 25 years living outside the United States. In South Africa I lived in Johannesburg and Cape Town, and taught History at the University of the Western Cape for 11 years. I came back to the US in 2008 and have been here ever since. I have a dual appointment with the Department of History, so I spend some of my time teaching there as well.

Classes being taught regularly at the University of Illinois (course number and title)

GWS 100 – Introduction to Gender and Women’s Studies

GWS 333 – Memory, Autobiography, and Memoir

GWS 385 – Black Women’s History and Culture

GWS 550 – Feminist Theory and Methods

Research Specialization

Gender history, women’s history, Southern African political history, institutional culture

Current research projects

I am interested in the histories of people that collaborated with apartheid, more than the histories of those who resisted the apartheid project. Oddly, there is more history of the individuals that resisted, and got arrested, and protested, but there are fewer good histories about how the institution was put into place and upheld. My current project is about a particular professor and the university where he worked. I am thinking about how racial discrimination and white ideology was taught and upheld within that institution.

I have other interests in history teaching in Zimbabwe, specifically how high school history teachers teach their own history (which is where I started out). I have also been writing a creative non-history version of my own family which lines up with my interest in self-writing.

What drew you to the department of gender and women’s studies? (1-2 sentences)

I’m kind of a self-taught gender and women’s studies person because I learned through the British model of graduate school where you don’t take coursework and only do a very deep and thorough thesis. I then did a post-doc in Gender and Women’s Studies at the Pembroke Center at Browne University in Rhode Island after I finished my Ph.D. in Zimbabwe. With that said, I never had the opportunity to take formal courses in Gender and Women’s Studies, so the opportunity to learn and teach that in an American university setting was very appealing to me.

Favorite places on campus (1-2 places)

My garden. I am waiting with great anticipation to find out what color some transplanted peonies will be when they bloom.